The Death of Rabelais: A Play

François Rabelais, on the run from religious conflict in Paris, falls in with an old friend and a strange new companion on a blizzarding night in January. On a dare, he trades his Jester’s cap for a Death’s cloak and accepts an invitation to join a feisty Twelfth Night festival. Little does he know that, before the night is up, he will go head-to-head with Death itself. As the group indulges in a series of games, from a riddle contest to a morality play, Rabelais proves that the chops of detection he acquired in Sonnez Les Matines continue to serve his comic search for truth; uncovering a knot of politics, romance, love, and hate that threatens to damn them all.

Wearing Death’s own guise and armed only with his favorite weapon, laughter, Rabelais must face his greatest fear: the possibility that grief, not joy, is at the center of reality.

“The Death of Rabelais is a brilliant, beautiful, bawdy play. It is also tragi-comic, a word that is often overused to mean both funny and sad at the same time, but in this instance evokes Scharl’s ability—especially through the eyes of Rabelais—to see humor’s power as a mechanism for both transgression and, through the strangeness of that transgression, love. For Rabelais, humor—and its power to poke holes in our own self-certainty—does not just destabilize our conceptions of our own selves and of others and of society, but also, all the more importantly, destabilizes our disposition towards despair. When we laugh at Death, or with her, we recognize that the tragedy of her inevitability is not all there is.”

-From the Foreword by Tara Isabella Burton